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When Yanick Joao Carneiro traveled to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Scarborough on Tuesday morning, he thought it was just for a regularly scheduled check-in.
He has yet to come home.
While a lawyer for Carneiro was able to file and get a federal judge in Maine to approve a temporary order barring his removal from the state, it came too late. By 6 p.m., he was outside that judge’s jurisdiction in Massachusetts. Where Carneiro was being held wasn’t known to his family or lawyer until a federal judge ordered the government to divulge that information.
In Maine, ICE’s enforcement operation has led to at least 100 arrests, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Thursday. But the agency does not have to share real-time information on arrests, and has been selective in sharing names and has not said where detainees are being sent.
Since the operation’s start on Tuesday, only two people have filed petitions in federal court seeking their release. Those cases, interviews with family members, lawyers and police reveal that people taken into custody are often quickly removed from Maine and enter into an opaque system that is nearly impossible for even seasoned lawyers to track their clients in.
“People have literally disappeared,” Azadeh Erfani, the policy director for the National Immigrant Justice Center, a Chicago-based legal aid group, said. “Lawyers, experienced lawyers, have not known how to locate their own clients after they’ve been taken into custody and then suddenly find out that they’re in Louisiana or Texas, getting very quickly prepared to be deported.”
During the Chicago enforcement operation called “Midway Blitz,” which started in September, people taken into custody were frequently sent from one facility to another across multiple states, making it hard for them to meet with lawyers, Erfani said. Even ICE’s online detainee locator website is inconsistent, she said.
Quick transfers between states have been a feature of immigration enforcement during President Donald Trump’s second term. Like in Carneiro’s case, judges can often lag ICE in issuing orders against taking someone from one state to another.
The jurisdictional changes make it harder for people that have been detained to find legal representation or even file themselves for an emergency order barring their removal from one jurisdiction to another. That reduces the amount of time they have to formulate and present their case for citizenship.
Neither ICE or other federal agencies responded to the BDN’s inquiries on its policies. The Trump administration has described detention as “non-punitive” and said it uses limited space to prepare detainees for deportation or secure those they deem flight risks. Some immigrants have been taken more than 1,000 miles from their arrest points.
There are six facilities in New England alone that have contracts to hold ICE detainees. Neither ICE or other federal agencies responded to the BDN’s inquiries. Some people detained in Maine so far have been sent to a county jail in Plymouth, Massachusetts, according to the court filings and interviews with lawyers and law enforcement.
In other cases from Maine, like that of Marcos Da Silva, who is originally from Brazil and was detained Tuesday in Portland, it took two days for family members and lawyers to find him. Da Silva is a contractor and had driven into Portland to pick a colleague up. Before he came to the U.S., Da Silva was a lawyer in Brazil, his wife, Alex, said.
Alex, who asked to be referred to by a nickname due to safety concerns, said she witnessed agents detain her husband while they were video chatting, she said Friday. She called Maine police departments after he was detained to try to find him, she said. He eventually appeared in ICE’s detainee database, where it said he was being held in Plymouth.
“We knew what could happen,” Alex said. “I did get out the words ‘I love you’ as he was being put into cuffs.”